Mary Butler (Waterford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

To be fair, there has been great collaboration between the five local authorities and their chief executives who have come together, and they attended that meeting we had. To go back to the point I made, 45% of the PAYE income tax per head is the average that comes from that region. Those figures do not lie and they point out that everything is not rosy in that particular area. The committee is currently looking at the cost of doing business in Ireland and that is the main body of our work at the moment. We did quite a body of work earlier in the year in regard to Brexit but we are concentrating on the cost of doing business, and we see huge discrepancies between the regions. We heard from Deputy Murphy about his region in the west. It is great to hear that some regions are doing extremely well, but we need to see the balance. There is a fantastic road network from Dublin to Waterford. Waterford and the south east want to act as a release hub or release valve for Dublin, which, as we all know, is overheating in regard to the cost of accommodation, while we are only two hours down the road.

I want to highlight the issues. There is a lot of good work being done, although it is not all for the IDA and there are a lot of other elements at play. I would like to get a comment from the Minister. I do not want to throw her in at the deep end, given she is only in the job a week.